Envato
Lead Engineer
Envato | Milkshake | Jan 2022 - Present
Lead Engineer of the Milkshake team. Milkshake is a popular mobile-first website builder for Android and iOS, continually ranking among the top productivity apps in the world.
Leading the development efforts of the Milkshake product from inception to scale.
Strong focus on mentoring and building capacity in the Engineering team.
Growing Milkshake from 0 users to one of the leading mobile website creation platforms.
As of June 2022 Milkshake has had 3+ million app downloads, 550 million site visitors and 2.5 billion page views!
Worked on subscription systems, custom analytics services for users, publishing systems, AB testing and many other projects.
Senior Engineer
Envato | Milkshake | Feb 2019 - Jan 2022 (3 yrs)
Senior Engineer in the Milkshake team. Helping to build, release and grow a new product from inception to production.
Core member of the Envato Milkshake team.
During 9 months of BAU was the only engineer taking care of the product.
Built and launched a native iOS/Android Website Builder in 6 months, from conception to production.
Senior Engineer
Envato | Content | May 2020 - Nov 2020 (7 mos)
Senior Engineer in the Content team at Envato.
Joined the newly formed ingestion team, focusing on author portfolio management on the Envato marketplaces.
Helping to build a collaborative culture, and raising the capacity of the engineering team.
Senior Engineer
Envato | Foundation | Jul 2016 - Feb 2019 (2 yrs 8 mos)
Senior Engineer in the Foundation team at Envato. The foundation team was formed with the purpose of increasing the performance, reliability, and decreasing the maintenance of the aging Envato market monolith.
Rebuilt, re-architected and re-platformed the customer facing frontend of the aging envato market monolith.
Achieved significant improvements in site performance, reliability, resilience and ability for engineers to create new and maintain existing features.
Made heavy use of caching techniques to keep applications fast and online despite the status of backend services.
Split the market monolith into a number of micro-services to aid with development, maintenance and uptime.
Introducing, consulting about, and advocating for Node.js as a reliable, performant and capable backend runtime. This was a new technology for the Market Engineering team, which had been almost exclusively using ruby for backend tech up to this point.
Introducing Typescript to a large scale, production app in Envato. As this was Envato’s first use of typescript this included: Facilitating technical discussions across Envato Engineering as to it’s suitability, and polling for receptiveness. Mentoring, educating and advocating for Typescript in the wider Envato team.
Created and conducted due diligence into frameworks to assist with AB testing at Envato.
Software Engineer
Envato | Discovery | Mar 2016 - Jul 2016 (5 mos)
Engineer in the Discovery team at Envato. Discovery was focused on improving the search abilities for customers in Envato market.
Helped build and maintain search systems.
Ran a self-hosted ElasticSearch cluster + systems to manage indexing and displaying search results.
Lead project to built custom search and item recommendation system (Hadoop, Elixir/ EMR).
Built performant and geographically distributed autosuggest service.
Lead project to built performant and geographically distributed font rendering service.
Software Engineer
Envato | Video | Jun 2015 - Mar 2016 (10 mos)
Envato video, Envato’s first mobile application, was one of the more technically ambitious and foundational projects which I took a technical lead on. A small team was formed with only two members to explore the possibility of allowing any regular non-tech savvy user the ability to customize and make use of the industry leading library of After Effects templates hosted on VideoHive.
This project was pure R&D with no clear path that should be taken to solve the complex technical, legal and product challenges. Due to this complexity many alternative solutions were explored and prototyped.
One of 2 developers that led the project to design, build and launch the Envato Video iOS app, from conception to production.
Built a highly scalable rendering backend which could edit, preview, render, watermark and encode Adobe After Effects and Blender projects from a mobile app which would allow users to modify visually complex templates.
Using Blender and a number of other video compositing tools as a total replacement of using After Effects in a cloud environment to render videos.
Development of a backend that was built and proven to scale to over 2000 servers with full performance monitoring and ability to trace jobs throughout the system.
Led the exploration and development of a real-time OpenGL/WebGL 3D rendering engine that would result in many orders of magnitude faster and cheaper rendering of video files.
Writing native c++ plugins for After Effects.
Writing plugins for blender in python.
The first use of golang in a production system at Envato.
The exploration and use of Kubernetes and Docker in the early days of development for these technologies.
Advocated for and built the micro-system architecture while this thinking was still new in the company.
Helped lead 2 rounds of technical due diligence on companies we were looking to acquire, one at the beginning of the project, and one at the end which led to the acquisition of PlaceIt by Envato.
Explored the legal challenges of running licensed software in the cloud (e.g. Adobe on AWS).
Worked alongside many stakeholders during the investigation and build of this project, everyone from CEO's and CTO's, to Legal teams. This was due to the unique nature of the project.
Software Engineer
Envato | Studio | Jan 2013 - Jun 2015 (2 yrs 6 mos)
Engineer in the Envato Studio team
First and most foundational work experience, getting exposed to the full-stack of web application development.
Worked in a small cross functional team which built and launched the Envato Studio freelance marketplace.
Led many projects related to search, real-time messaging and user presence detection, analytics and experimented with new concepts for UIs and growth experiments.
Started while studying full-time at uni.
Was mentored by many excellent Engineers.
